Month: August 2005

TAKING MY INVENTORY

Psychoanalysis is outdated. If you really want to learn about yourself, take over a popular blog for a few days, scribble away about the odd ideas that no conventional publication would ever let you air, and wait about twenty minutes for the flood of e-mailed corrections, ass-kickings, character judgments, and other miscellaneous reactions that you’ve so roundly earned in certain cases and in other cases don’t deserve.

My half-fanciful conversation-starter notion that it’s high time we let terrorism change our way of life has gotten the most mail so far. So as to make ourselves a trickier target and perhaps recivilize our blasted rural landscape I called for (among other things) a decentralization of social power and infrastructure and the repopulation of our small towns and cities. Many of you responded by calling me an idiot, which is accurate enough in general, and some of you sensed an anti-urban bias in what I wrote. Well, I don’t have such a bias. Living in Montana hasn’t caused me to hate New York but to appreciate it in ways that those who live there day-in and day-out may not be able to. Dwelling in the country sucks sometimes. It gets lonesome and boring and when you make a wave it sloshes around forever in the small tidepool until you can hardly walk downtown without getting glares or snickers. It’s also very peaceful, relatively inexpensive, and markedly hassle-free, liberating much personal time and energy. It doesn’t take half an hour to mail a letter here or to obtain a driver’s license renewal. I like Montana in some ways and don’t in others, but we land where we land in life and we make the best of it.

Would spreading out consume more energy, though? A lot of you say that it would, but I’m not sure. The kind of shift I’m talking about is not towards more suburban sprawl but towards a revitalization of real towns that used to have sidewalks and drugstores and movie theaters and were, in fact, dense miniature urban clusters. Until Wal-Mart came along, that is. Living in such places and working in them would be no more wasteful of energy, I’d wager, than our current practice of staging massive two-way daily commutes into major cites.

The next largest stir I’ve caused so far resulted from my saying that politics bores me. I meant a certain kind of politics, based on media-driven “wedge issues” such as the Ten Commandment business and so on. Such controversies are calculated, I feel, to whip people up into frenzies of contribution-making, petition-signing, and opinion poll-answering that steal away energy from our actual lives to power the professional political establishment. I like to talk about politics myself some, which is why I’m doing this blog, but the politics that interests me arises out of people’s real situations and on-the ground-concerns. It doesn’t issue from the fax machines of lobbyists and party hacks. We’re playing their game when we jump each time they bark at us and maybe it’s time to act deaf next time they do and, as I stated, talk about ourselves instead of about what they’d prefer we talked about. Like whether John Bolton is an easy boss.

Finally, a few journalists have written me to say how dare you “impugn” our profession by saying that we sometimes hold back the juiciest stories in order to maintain our close relationships with the people we’re reporting on. Well, tough. I’ve seen it happen. Journalists should be outsiders, period. Let the insiders come to us or be ignored and forgotten. But let’s not cater to them, embroiling ourselves in their careers and doing favors in return for other favors. It’s not the politician who ought to be covered by term limits, it’s the reporters, especially if they can’t resist the temptation to be accepted by the folks they ought to be offending consistently.

– posted by Walter

ASK, DON’T TELL

I saw yesterday that Norman Pearlstine, an editorial honcho at Time Inc., just recently told a New York audience that the guarantee of anonymity granted to Karl Rove in the Valerie Plame kerfuffle wasn’t justified by the value of the info that Rove disclosed, confirmed, or whatever. He’s right, I suppose, but that’s not what interests me about this whole affair, whose very presence in the news – and especially on the front pages and magazine covers and at the top of broadcast after broadcast – wasn’t justified by the underlying info, as evidenced by the cessation of this coverage before most of the main issues have been resolved.

The story got the play it did, I think, because it cast the journalists involved in a coveted, heroic, old-fashioned role — as crusading truth tellers, researchers, and promise keepers. They dig for the facts, and as they dig they stand up to the highest powers that be, meanwhile putting their words of honor on the line as a way of reassuring anxious sources. This is a flattering notion in a period when the reality is just the opposite.

What big-time Washington journalists largely do these days, in my experience, is to get as close as possible to power, socially and in every other way, while maintaining the legal fiction that they aren’t implicated in its workings. They send their kids to school with power’s kids, they marry it, they go to parties with it, they jabber with it on the phone, they watch the game with it from adjoining seats, and, as a natural result, they keep its confidences — until, that is, some secret leaks out anyway and they have to pretend that they didn’t already know it but will get to the bottom of it immediately or that they knew it all along and just weren’t telling their audiences because they were bound by some lofty code of ethics that allows them to do the jobs they rarely do. They’re profound double-dealers, is what I’m saying, who pay for their access, influence, and by going along and getting along until it’s simply too embarrassing not to. They reserve their best stories for one another, publishing them only when they have to and feeling very nervous when they do, because it might screw up the Great Arrangement. And afterwards, once the secrets are on the street, it often comes out that they were common knowledge among the people whose jobs it was to tell them.

Quick story. In the mid 1980s I went to a fancy Fifth Av. party for Senator Ted Kennedy. There were journalists there and lots of other bigwigs. The only time I’d seen Kennedy before was at a campaign stop in 1979 when he’d been seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He might have won, but I realized at the party that it would have been a terrible thing because he was the drunkest human being I had ever encountered in my life, and chances were that it hadn’t just started that night. Sure, he already had this reputation, but it was a vague reputation, all myth and gossip, while the intoxicated wreck in front of me was as vivid and specific as a car wreck. How many thousands of times, I wondered, had such behavior as I was witnessing been quietly countenanced by journalists, and how much other wild, scary stuff pertaining to other movers and shakers who had a shot at ruling the free world, say, had they deftly slipped into their back pockets in return for the right to attend such parties as this one?

I was a kid then, in my early twenties, and I couldn’t answer that question. Now I’m older, I’ve seen more, and I can. A certain kind of job in journalism can only be kept if its holder, for the most part, refrains from doing it.

– posted by Walter

TALK ABOUT YOURSELF FOR A CHANGE

It’s starting. God help us. On Fox News just now I heard Senator Evan Bayh handicapping his own chances for the presidential nomination and talking about running against Hillary. It reminds me of pro wrestling, this stuff. They get us geared up an eon in advance for a fake fight, the battle of the century, and the ticket-buying mania begins. The rivals plot and posture, working us up even further for a match whose outcome, we’re led to think, will have titanic consequences for everyone, and yet when it finally comes, not much changes except that the political establishment has a lot more money in its pockets. The issues are mostly symbolic. As I sit here on my Montana farm, I could care less about the Ten Commandments, the past behavior of Supreme Court nominees, whether Karl Rove outed a non-spy spy, and if John Bolton likes to yell at people.

Other than Jen-and-Brad celebrity gossip and the serial popular novels posing as crime stories such as this Aruba thing, this hyped-up so-called politics is all people have to talk about now, it seems. I remember when people talked about themselves. At thee dinner table and in the diner you heard about that sports car-from-a-kit your neighbor was building, about some lady’s kidney tumor, about who was wooing another man’s wife, and about the bear that was eating from someone’s apple tree. These little stories added up to life. You got a sense of how people were actually managing. Now you hear what they’re thinking. What a bore. Most of them can’t think, and have never tried, and are just repeating what others think and adding their own misinterpretations and biases. I could care less, frankly. I’d rather hear about what somebody’s doing to get rid of the bat infestation in their attic. But no, it’s Washington, Washington, Washington, which is thousand of miles away from western Montana but has somehow convinced us it’s right next door. Well, it’s not. The neighbors are next door. But because they talk only about politics, I have no idea what their lives are like and they don’t either for the most part, they don’t either. They’re trying to join the “national conversation” and meanwhile the bears are eating their apples.

Me, I don’t even have a politics — not in any coherent left-right sense — and I wonder sometimes where other people get theirs. No one’s born a Republican or a Democrat or even and Independent, for Pete’s Sake, but in time we all become one or the other. Bowing to expectations, it seems to me, trying to seem grown-up and serious and entitled to join in a “debate” that’s about as substantial sometimes as Friday night stadium cage-match. The older I get, the less I’m bothered by low voter turn-out. It’s a rational response to an irrational spectacle that mostly just profits its promoters.

TERROR FROM MONTANA

I’ll start with something that’s been bugging me but that I haven’t had a forum to write about: this idea, almost universally agreed upon, that Americans mustn’t let terrorism change our way of life. I disagree. Our way of life had its problems before Osama appeared, and we probably could have stood to change it then, but now that we have the added impetus of being collectively attacked in ways that we never dreamed about in past years, I think it’s high time that we did a few thing differently that maybe we should have done already
Like, say, spread out a little geographically. I live in Montana, way out in the country, near towns that have been abandoned and depopulated and could use a few resources from the threatened cities that have made themselves sitting ducks for sabotage by building their infrastructures so dense and tall that a pellet gun could knock them over. There’s a price for supersaturating small areas with people, wealth, and technology, and now we’re paying it by trying to secure in thousands of ways targets that are inviting as they come. This folly of rebuilding the World Trade Center proves that we’d rather be proud and stubborn than safe. Here we go piling up the blocks again just to show how bloodied but unbowed we are instead of learning our lesson and reshaping things. It’s not the de-urbanization of the cities that I’m dreaming about here, it’s the re-urbanization of the towns — places where strangers can easily be spotted and people can’t be vaporized by the hundreds merely by stuffing a few bombs into some backpacks.

IDEAS, PLEASE: Maybe I don’t sound serious. I am. At least in this respect I am: responding to terrorism with inflexibility isn’t going to work, I fear, and unless we start entertaining notions as wild and possibly half-baked as situating our treasure and our people in places where they don’t invite assault we’re not only daring the bad guys to bring it on, we’re forgetting that the beauty of our society is that it can mold itself to new realities rather than march in lockstep like the Redcoats toward all-too-predictable catastrophes.
I guess I’m just weary of hearing that beating terrorism means doing what we’ve always done but a whole lot harder, with more firmly gritted teeth. That’s what Iraq’s about, it seems to me: fighting the Gulf War over again, but this time with feeling. It’s like rebuilding the World Trade Center and calling it The Freedom Tower or whatever. Why not call it the Lack-of-Imagination Tower? And while we’re at it, why not call The Energy Bill that does almost nothing to address the fact that our fuel supply is being pumped directly out of our children’s veins and arteries while enriching our enemies’ war chest The Out-of-New-Ideas Bill?
I’m a fiction writer and a book critic, not a professional political journalist, and the behavior of our leaders nowadays reminds me of Captain Ahab or King Lear and doesn’t prompt thoughts about issues and philosophies. I think I know megalomania when I see it, in literature and also in life, and I think I know too when when a plot has swerved toward tragedy. It happens when events reveal a flaw in the basic approach of the protagonist and he reacts to the bad news by clinging to that flaw more strenuously. Aside from the Bill of Rights, which protects our very ability to change, let’s change what we can as quickly as we can and see what works and what doesn’t in this fight instead of going all stiff and stern. That’s our advantage, after all: we can revise our doctrines and they can’t.
Ideas, please, the kookier the better. Mine, as I’ve said, is scatter, reduce our profile, go to work in our homes as much as possible instead of converging every morning on Wall Street and Times Square, and let them try to hit a moving target. And don’t build that foolish Freedom Tower thing. Change doesn’t mean the terrorists have won. Not changing does. Ask the Redcoats. Or better yet, ask the Native Americans. They stood tall too, once, here on the very spot where I’m sitting now.

– posted by Walter

INTRODUCING WALTER

Dan Savage is inimitable, as you have now discovered. I loved every post, and I certainly hope I’m the exception. What’s the point of a blog if you can’t offend some readers? For my part, I’ve been lollygagging around with the DP and the beagle. Life is short. Next week, I’m going to try and write an essay I’ve been toying with for a year. Meanwhile, one of the best critics and novelists of his generation, Walter Kirn, will be writing in this space for the next and final week of my blogatical. Here’s an interview with him. He’s the author of “Thumbsucker”, “Up In The Air”, and “She Needed Me”, and has been recently writing some steaming criticism for the New York Times Book Review. I generally share this sentiment. Make him feel at home, will ya?

– posted by Andrew.

PARTING SHOTS

I want to thank Andrew for allowing me to flail around in this space all week.

A few readers wanted to know how the Savage/Sullivan Axis of Evil came together. I’m a lefty, he’s a righty-how could we possibly be pals? Here’s the secret: Andrew, as he proves on this website on an almost daily basis, is not doctrinaire. Neither am I. While we disagree about a whole host of things-I’m for a single-payer health care, Paul Krugman (love that man!), hate crimes legislation, Hillary Clinton-there’s plenty of things on which we do agree. Like Andrew, I’m a supporter of gay marriage, I think recreational drugs should be legalized, and I think that, competently managed, American military power can be a force for good in the world.

So am I fan of Andrew’s writing-his books, his blog-just because we’re friends, as some readers theorized? Ah, no. I don’t admire his work just because he’s my pal. The reverse, actually. I read Andrew for years-in TNR and elsewhere-and admired his writing and great, big brain long before I had the opportunity to meet him. The friendship grew out of my admiration for his writing, not the other way around.

To those who wanted to know when I would start a blog of my own: I’m flattered, but that’s not going to happen. I just don’t have the time. Guest blogging this week just about killed me; I don’t know how Andrew does it. But I do occasionally post in a group blog called SLOG written by the editorial staffers at my paper, The Stranger. Feel free to drop by. If you enjoyed my writing this week, please think about buying my upcoming book, The Commitment.

And finally, I’d like to thank You People. I had a blast writing for you this week, and enjoyed your emails-even when you were trying to tear my head off. I enjoyed those emails most of all, actually.

-posted by Dan.

GET OUT NOW

Okay, I have a half an hour until my stint here as guest-blogger ends and I turn back into pumpkin. I wish I had more time to flesh this out, but I have to leave for the airport in a half an hour so I’m just going to have to blast through this. Forgive the stream of consciousness, the misspellings, and the rambling nature of this post.

Look, I was for this thing. I went out on limb and backed it. I wanted it to succeed. I still do.

But it’s time to declare victory and get the fuck out. Thanks to the incompetence of this administration, we can no longer avoid the “Q” word. It’s a quagmire. Period. Listening to Marketplace while I made dinner tonight, I learned that attacks on military convoys have gone up-doubled or tripled, I didn’t have a pen-in the last 12 months. How’d that happen? How many billions spent and how many Americans and Iraqis dead and yet things just keep going from bad to worse.

It seems that the more corners we’re told we’ve turned, the more walls we run into. And it just keeps coming back to manpower-“just enough troops to lose,” as Andrew says. There were never enough troops on the ground, and since this President never met a fuck-up that he wouldn’t pin a Medal of Freedom on, the same fuck-ups who mismanaged this thing from the start are still grinning at us on TV.

Does anyone in the White House know what the fuck they’re doing? One day it’s the war on terror, the next day it’s got a new name, then it’s back to the war on terror. We’re going to set a date to start reducing troop levels-no, wait, we’re not. Killing Saddam’s sons will change things for the better, no wait. Capturing Saddam will take the wind out of the sails of the insurgency. Now that everyone in Iraq has a purple finger, the insurgents are going to slink away. We clear a town of insurgents, but we don’t have the manpower to hold it, so we pull the troops out and-surprise-the insurgents take the town back. “Dead enders,” “last throes,” “losing stream.”

On and on it goes, and the news doesn’t change, or get any better. If it needs a new name perhaps we should call it the Groundhog’s Day War. Does anyone believe that the Iraqi Constitution-coming on Monday-is going to change a damn thing?

George Bush is good at one thing and one thing only: winning elections and coasting along. Forget the maybe/maybe not criminal outing of a CIA agent-the prosecution of this war is this administration’s signature crime. My friends who admonish me for not seeing this coming the run-up to the war are right, it pains me to admit. I have no longer have any faith-none whatever-in Bush, Rummy, Condi, Dick, or the rest of the jackasses running this show. And like all liberals who supported this thing, I’m angier about George Bush’s handling of this war than any liberal who opposed it. Liberal hawks wanted to win this more desperately than anyone else. But it’s time to bring down the curtain-why? Not because war I hate Bush so much that I want to see my country lose this war-I love my country-and not because I don’t care about the Iraqi people. I’m one of those liberals who backed the war for humanitarian reasons.

No, we should get out because, with the Bushies running the show for the next three years, we’re simply not going to win. It’s just go to drag on and on. This war, as I see it now, is either going to be nasty, brutal and short or nasty, brutal and long. I prefer nastry, brutal and short, if only because it will mean fewer Americans will die. And fewer Iraqis too, I suspect.

To paraphrase a war hero: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for an incompetent ?

-posted by Dan.

ALL APOLOGIES

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to post any additional comments today. There’s a lot more I wanted to say about Iraq-like where I’m at now, not three years ago. And there’s so much else going on that I wanted to write about. I wanted to write up Iran and the whole “hanging homos” thing. I’m curious to know if anyone is going to ask Bush-or Dobson or Falwell or Roberts or Santorum-what they think about Iran executing gay men. I wanted to write about childhood obesity, and share my observations about the CRAP 99% of parents seem content to feed their kids.

But I’ve been swamped at work today.

I’m almost reluctant to mention what I spent the afternoon doing, but full disclosure: The Stranger is having an amateur porn contest and I’ve been sitting in a conference room watching the submissions. Sound like fun? It’s not. I’m not a big fan of professional porn, much less amateur porn. There are places where the sun isn’t meant to shine. Here’s an interesting tidbit… we got 43 submissions, which doesn’t sound like much, but it’s our first year. (We modeled our event on an amateur porn contest held every year in Boston, and they’ve been at it for six years and get roughly 25 submissions per year. So we’re feeling pretty good about the number of tapes we got it.) Of those, about 35 are from straight couples (and triples and quads). The rest? From lesbians.

Hm.

None-not one-from gay men. Does that strike anyone else as… odd? Aren’t gay men supposed to be the shameless sexual adventurers? Not gay men in Seattle, it would appear.

-posted by Dan.

ALL APOLOGIES: But it’s six here, and I’ve got to get home and have dinner with my boyfriend and kid. We like to eat as a family, you see. I’m flying to Chicago later tonight-on a midfuckingnight redeye-but if I can slip away after dinner and get to a cafe with WiFi before I have to head to the airport I’ll blast out a few last posts. In the meantime, here’s one last letter from a reader…

-posted by Dan.

JUST ONE MORE LETTER:

Dan: As a fellow pinko-commie-liberal (though you still have me beat on the Jerry-Fallwell-hate-o-meter since I’m not a homo-pinko-commie-liberal), I am thrilled to see that at least one of my fellow travelers understands the history of the Middle East and the West’s duties therein.- And I am pleased to agree with you that war is sometimes the answer- you do have to break a few eggs to make an omlette.- Sometimes terrorism can even be the answer- it certainly brought an end to a millennium of injustice and genocide for the Irish.- And the line you cited from Bob Kerrey (how did we end up with John Kerry again?) is pure gold.- However, I-feel a bit let down that you missed several key points that forced me to oppose the war.

1) Bush is an idiot and some problems are like your plumbing.- It’s better to let them stay broken until you find a skilled plumber, than to try to fix it yourself and make it even more broken.- You can’t trust this man to correctly make soup from a can, much less fix the most broken region on the planet.

2) You said it yourself: Iraq is one of “these pseudo-states could only be ruled by brute force.”- If a 3-way partition was the plan, I would have probably supported the war.- But as early as October 2002 both Bush and Blair soundly rejected any partition and promised a democratic Iraq within its present, wholly fictitious borders.- As I told anyone who would listen at the time, that was the moment, 6 months before the first shot was fired, when we lost the war.- Iraq, much like Yugoslavia, is a figment of Winston Churchill’s imagination (he was the point man in drawing the borders of both nations), and both could only be ruled by a strongman with an Iron Fist.

3) Why Iraq?- There are lots of countries in the region (Iran and Saudi Arabia come to mind) that are much more important, more homogenous, more dangerous, and which would create far fewer problems regionally.- Specifically here I am referring to the enormous windfall increase in power and prestige both internally and regionally that the hard-line clerics in Iran have reaped through this invasion and overthrow of their neighbor and greatest rival.- Oh, and by the time the US Military has extricated itself from Iraq and regrouped enough to do this sort of thing again, Iran will be nuclear (or, as the Boob-In-Chief would say, nucular).- Thus, our mutually-agreed upon plan for an Extreme Makeover- Mid-Eastern Edition will be dead In-Utero.

4) Finally, there is a strategy for Western occupation of the Muslim world that would have been far less bloody- instead of turning Iraq into a third-world, crap-hole, anarchic, nominal Democracy, why not look to the Muslim world’s large, flourishing Democracies to be our forward guard in this war?- Particularly, let’s look at Turkey- how can we tell the people of the Middle East to go Western when the already-Western Turkey can’t get into the EU,-is languishing in economic turmoil, and there seems to be no help in sight from the West?- How about we give them some incentive to change here!-Greg M., Dallas, Texas

-posted by Dan.

–

FROM THE INBOX

The mail is pouring in…

I really, really try to understand how my friends could support George’s invasion of Iraq. Afghanistan, I understand and supported. I just wish we would have finished the job before invading a country that was not involved with 9/11.
The idea that because of 19 guys with box cutters hijacked some airliners and rammed them into buildings killing 3,000 or so people does not give the USA the right to be stupid. Invading, occupying and imposing our brand of capitalism on a whole region just because we are afraid of guys with boxcutters does not make any sense to me.
Are we wimps? Are we not smart and strong enough to deal with fascist Muslims without causing the deaths of tens of thousands and spending $300,000,000,00 and making a mess of the region? Other costs are not easily measured, like our countries esteem, influence, etc. I am an American living in Europe with my German boyfriend, soon to be husband. The low point of me being American was sitting at LHR waiting for a flight, everyone around me reading newspapers plastered with full page color pictures of Abu Ghraib.
To quote W, you are either with us or against us. Your support of the war is going to cost us 4 more years of W, no chance in hell of federal civil unions, no same sex immigration, dirtier air and water, no chance of basic useful healthcare for everyone, and on and on. Bush used this war to divide our country. I feel sorry for you regarding the mistake of supporting W’s invasion.
Larry R., London

As a Seattlelite I have read may of your columns over the years, and since I read Andrew it was fun to see you step in.
Your arguments in favor of going into Iraq are full of lefty justifications, but very short on pragmatic reality. Doing what you propose requires a LOT of troops, and a LOT of political commitment. More than we have of either. So it sounds neat, just like doing a crash program to reduce greenhouse emissions sounds neat, but it is not real world-thinking. It ain’t gonna happen.
Also, it is utopian. Why should we think we could reform entire societies to our liking? That just sounds fantastically unlikely. There is, in fact, no precedent for such a project (no, Japan & Germany are not precedents, they had to lose catastrophic wars they instigated to get the necessary conditions on the ground). How do we deal with Al Qaida & their ilk? Not with your grand plans, but in smaller, less dramatic steps:
1. Overturn state sponsors of terrorism. This means you, Taliban. No Islamo-fascist client states propped up by terrorists.
2. Concentrate hard on containing fissile material. That means deal with N. Korea before they break the UN locks (whoops, too late), pay lots of $ to former USSR states & scientists, etc. Yes, germs and chemicals are bad, but nuclear is the real threat. Fissile material requires a state to produce. It is too difficult for a terrorist group to make. They can only buy or steal it.
3. Reduce dependence on oil. This means CAFE, windmills, nuclear, gas taxes, mass transit. Side benefit: lower greenhouse emissions.
4. Don’t base US troops in Muslim dictatorships. Turkey or other reasonable governments are OK. (I know the only other decent Muslim governments are Bangladesh, Jordan, & Malaysia. Tough.) Infidels colluding with corrupt and cruel dictatorships to base Christian troops in the Mid-east just throws fuel on the fire.
5. Collaborate with our erstwhile pals in Europe and elsewhere to track and monitor terrorists. A lot of sustained police work.
6. Be allies with Israel, but don’t reflexively take their side over the Palestinians. The Palestinians are really getting the shaft, and we can’t forget that even though they choose rotten leaders and support terrorism. We have to be seen as at least slightly independent of Israel.
7. Preach tolerance, and live that way at home. This means you, Dobson.
8. Don’t torture people, especially using tactics designed to offend Islam. Duh.
I know this is less satisfying in the short run, but it is sustainable and can work. A good President (Gore) following 9/11 would have done a lot of this. He would not have listened to you, by the way.
Tom W.

It is also overstating the case that the West made the Middle East what it is today. The winning European Powers of World War I drew those lines with the collusion of those Arabs in power at the time. That they were trying to stack the deck in their favor doesn’t change the fact that they had plenty of help. The point is, time always changes the playing field, and France was once our ally, now they are our adversary. Others who were our enemies are now our allies. We have to make our foreign policy decisions based on what we think is in the long-term favor of America. Not an easy task. President Bush has done a tremendous job in the War on Terrorism; despite the opposition internally and externally. You were right to support the war then and would be in the right to support it now.
Darell

Let me see if I have this right. Immediately after the worst attack on our soil, rather than allow the emotions surrounding such an event to unfold you immediately rushed to judgment about “the west” having to invade the Middle East. And this is because the British did plan borders well enough. 100 years ago.
And it was those darned leftist liberals, who by and large supported the invasion of Afghanistan (you know, where the terrorists were set up), that just couldn’t understand why Iraq had to be invaded. Because the US has a responsibility to fix the world’s problems. Through violent warfare. And it shouldn’t matter that the justifications for this war have been changed more than my underwear. We should be okay with being lied to.
But now you don’t support the war because the current regime is screwing it up. Not that the left was saying this all along or anything – no they were to be ignored because they just don’t have a grasp on reality.
But even though we (and indeed, every other imperialist invasion throughout recorded history) have failed in Iraq, we better get behind the idea of bombing the hell out of the Middle East at some point in the future and setting up democracies because, again, the British didn’t plan those damned borders well enough 100 years ago.
I suggest that you keep to sex advice columns.
Michael M.

Yes, the US has had a range of alliances with nasty ME dictators. That does not make us responsible for what they have done. Alliances are often a matter of choosing among a set of bad options. The US chose to ally with the USSR in World War II. That does not make us responsible for all bad that the USSR did.
In short, I don’t see a compelling moral obligation for the US to remake the Middle East. It might (or might not) be a praiseworthy thing to do, but I suspect in practice that it will not be. It is just too complicated and costly a thing for a single state to undertake, even for the sole superpower. The US public is quickly losing interest in and commitment toward the enterprise, which surprises me not at all. Wars of attrition are not the strong suit of democracies.-Matt K.

-posted by Dan.